I am (very slowly) making my way towards actually making an effort to do some writing at some point in time in the future, maybe, and have tasked my mind for some story ideas. Ideas usually come at me when I’m writing, so you can see the catch 22 dilemma here: need to write to get ideas, need to get ideas to write. And so the circle goes.
I intend to complete my Hong Kong zombie story, but also to write some short pieces of fiction just to whet my whistle. Writing is a muscle, and it needs working before it can be effective, so the idea of just batting out short flashes of fiction is in my parlance akin to having a bit of a stretch and warm up before going for a big run.
When the ideas come, though, they come at odd moments. Following a restless night some days ago, where I skipped in and out of dreams about alien invasions and joining the contestants on US Celebrity Apprentice (not in the same dream I should add, although I accept this would make an awesome episode. Imagine Meatloaf trying to project manage a children’s musical while spaceships are destroying New York outside. Who says I don’t get any ideas?), I lay there, staring at the ceiling early in the morning and found myself wondering where all the good futuristic city sci-fi stories had gone. Perhaps I’ve never looked properly. Perhaps I believed that I had read the greatest futuristic city book already (Only Forward, by Michael Marshall Smith) and see the best film (you shouldn’t need to guess this one) so why bother looking?
So, good point. But what about writing one? How about going a step further and writing a series of short stories based in a futuristic city, loosely intertwined, yet heavily character based and connected only by their existence in this same world? I have already written a few short stories in such a vein and enjoyed the freedom of creating a story in a whole new undiscovered country. In my teenage youth I had desires to write a novel based on a city on an asteroid, and a young boy kidnapped and transported from earth to this place. The ideas were great. I even had a song. Both the song and the title of the novel was awful, and will not bear repeating here. The story faded, as all stories do if they remain in ones head and not on the page, but the images I conjured in my imagination are there still in my memory. The story may have been rubbish, but the world was not. I could awaken it once more.
It could work. I have a rough outline in my head of a story already, of a husband suspecting his wife of adultery and his attempts to investigate, all set on the canvas of this fantastical city out there in space. Normal characters/abnormal places. I like normal characters. I enjoy putting them in weird new places* and poking them with a stick.
The trick, as always, is getting them out of my head. Before they fade.
*readers of Warp Factory will probably be nodding in agreement at this point.
